Introduction to the Course and Author

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Node Program and this is the Node.js course. This lesson will be an introduction. It's not going to be very technical except for the few definitions. I'm using version 5.1. I'm recommending to use version 5.X. And this courseware updated in January 2016. So before we start, I want you to have a few of the technologies and libraries installed on your machine. So while you're watching this lecture, you can start downloading if you haven't installed them already. So obviously we would need Node.js and npm. And then, I would recommend to use a code editor versus an IDE (Interactive Development Environment). Why? Because we will be working on the very fundamental and very low level libraries and patterns. So, you don't really need that complexity, those benefit that an IDE would provide and I don't want you to spend a lot of time configuring an IDE. But if you're already familiar with an IDE and you've worked with Node.js, so feel free to use it. But I recommend and encourage you to just use a plain code editor like Sublime Text or Atom or Brackets or something similar.

Then you would need an application to access a command line. Usually in most operation systems, you already have it. It's either a terminal app or iTerm on the Mac, and then on the Windows you have command prompt. Obviously, you would need internet connections to download some of the code examples and to download the libraries using npm.

And then you would need this PDFs because often I would provide a link to a module or to some research. And instead of you typing from the screen, it's really, really good to just click on it in your PDF. So go ahead and do that and we will continue with the lesson.

In addition to Node.js and npm, I also recommend for you to install MongoDB. MongoDB...it's a very good database for prototyping and some of the examples, later in this lesson, will need MongoDB. Alternatively, you can use MySQL or PostgreSQL but they would not be covered in this course in very detail.

So, a little bit about myself. My name is Azat Mardan. I've worked at Capital One. Before Capital One, I've worked at DocuSign, Storify and FDIC, which is Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and National Institute of Health and various other digital agencies, consultancy companies and startups.

So at Storify, we use Node.js and Javascript for the entire stack, unlike some other companies that use Node.js only for some parts of their technical stack. So that was really, really groundbreaking. It was 2011, 2012, 2013, very early in the Node.js days and I got to experience how to build production application for relatively large scale and large traffic. So we used Express. We used Backbone and jQuery, and we used Jade and Stylus. At Docusign, we re-engineered the WebApp that was built C# and .Net. We re-engineered it using Backbone and Node.js and of course Express.js as well.

I've authored multiple books on Node.js and Javascript. One of the latest is ReactQuickly, Full Stack Javascript and then, one of the popular ones are Practical Node.js and Pro Express.js. The funny thing that Practical Node.js was at the top of Amazon if you search on Node.js, but it's not my best book. I consider Pro Express.js to be one of my best books. And ReactQuickly and FullStack Javascript...what's interesting about those books, I started experimenting with videos so they all come with screencasts and the source code available on GitHub. So, if you prefer video format, definitely check those videos. They're all free.